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New Orleanians need faster election results: Editorial

Voters queue up to vote at St. Dominic School in Lakeview on Election Day. St. Dominic is the largest polling site in New Orleans with 13 precincts and approximately 10,000 voters.
(Photo by Matthew Hinton, NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune)

"Voters -- and candidates, for that matter -- deserve prompt results. New Orleanians didn't get that Tuesday night."

Orleans Parish elections officials have all sorts of excuses for being excessively late with returns Tuesday night: the large number of absentee and early votes cast, staff time spent helping voters who were confused about where to vote, a mysterious "formatting" problem that made it difficult to print forms for the state.

But none of that sufficiently explains why results for New Orleans races were sent to the secretary of state's office hours after other parishes had finished their tallies. The state got the last votes from the city a little before 3 a.m., a spokesperson for the secretary of state said. That was too late for the numbers to be posted to the state's website, so they had to be manually entered Wednesday.

"I'd rather be late than regretful. This is not a race," Orleans Parish Registrar of Voters Sandra Wilson said. How about being timely and accurate?

Voters -- and candidates, for that matter -- deserve prompt results. New Orleanians didn't get that Tuesday night, and many went to sleep without knowing who had won some races or which way the Crescent City Connection toll vote was going.

The 30,000 early and absentee ballots cast in the city shouldn't have been such a problem. For one thing, election officials should have been prepared for higher numbers than in 2008. If nothing else, the lines at early voting sites should have been a hint.

Other parishes had similar numbers to deal with and managed to wrap up at a reasonable hour Tuesday. St. Tammany, which had 28,000 early and absentee votes, and East Baton Rouge, which had 34,000, were done by 11 p.m. Jefferson Parish, which had 23,500, closed up shop at 1 a.m.

Early voting is done on machine, which left Orleans Parish with roughly 5,000 paper absentee ballots to tally. Ms. Wilson said her office began sending information on those and the early voting totals to the parish elections board at 1 p.m., which is when state law allows them to begin processing the votes. Twelve hours later, the formatting problem occurred. Even with that glitch, it is difficult to understand why it took almost two more hours to get complete numbers to the state.

This is not the first time Orleans Parish's returns have been late. In 2010, there was a gap between 9:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. when no new results were posted from the city to the state's website. A spokesman for the secretary of state's office said then that one problem was "very, very slow" transmission of data from the computer in Mr. Morrell's office. That year, the secretary of state's computer system also was overwhelmed.

The runoff Dec. 8 will be small, but there will be another major election next fall in Louisiana. Orleans Parish elections officials need to get their act together before then.